In other words, if you want to send your child to the very best schools in the District, as determined by standardized testing—Ross Elementary in Dupont Circle, for example, or Thomson School, which covers Chinatown, Metro Center, and Mount Vernon Square—it may be possible to buy a home for less than $800,000, but many home prices will hover around or above that number. Even if you move to a district that is ranked a “2” on this scale (with “1” marking the highest-performing schools schools and “5” marking the worst) you can still expect to pay well over $600,000 for a home.

Upon further research, I found that not only is it pretty easy for a rat to climb up a three-inch toilet drain pipe (most of the time there’s not even water in it), but I live in a part of D.C. with a combined sewer system, so the storm drains on the street and the pipes from the toilets run to the same place. A combined sewer is one big, happy, Rat Central Station.